Gordon spent almost 15 years taking photographs of the annual carnival in Jacmel for her book, Kanaval: Vodou, Politics and Revolution on the Streets of Haiti (Soul Jazz Publishing, £19.99). She captures the stock characters of the carnival tradition in all their exaggerated, and often disturbing, grotesqueness: the Lasndsetkod (devils with horns and whips who carry dismembered doll parts); Chaloskas (deranged soldiers with buck teeth and blood red lips); Bakos (mythical creatures from the Haitian collective unconscious); Papa Jwif (the Haitian version of the archetypal Wandering Jew). There are transvestites, zombies, whores and various representations of Mo (the Dead), whose whitened faces and hoods set them apart from Zombi (the Differently Dead) in their white sheets and chains.

"Haiti's history is not an easy one," writes Gordon in her introduction, citing the genocide of the indigenous Taino Indians by Spanish invaders and the sustained brutality of the French colonial system, which led to the uprising by African and Creole slaves against white plantation owners. That rebellion, fuelled by reports of the success of the French Revolution, began in 1791 and lasted 13 years. In 1804, Haiti became a republic and, as Gordon puts it, "the first independent nation in Latin America, the first post-colonial independent black-led nation in the world, and the only nation whose independence was gained as part of a successful slave revolt."

Gordon wrote her introduction just two weeks before the earthquake hit Haiti, devastating the picturesque old town of Jacmel, where her Kanaval pictures were taken. Every year, in Jacmel's pre-Lent Mardi Gras celebrations, the performers act out the nation's history and culture in a mixture of performance, myth-making, and exaggerated spectacle. It is Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty transposed on to the streets of Jacmel, and shot though with elements of Vodou ritual and scabrous political satire as well as often extraordinarily inventive self-expression. Unlike, say, the bacchanalian carnival festivities in Rio de Janeiro, Jacmel's celebrations are truly weird and often genuinely frightening, their participants, as another essayist in Kanaval, Donald Cosentino, puts it, like "characters in some commedia dell'arte from hell".

The problems of photographing such an event are myriad and, by now, well-documented: the fetishisation of the other; the representation of the "raw" and the "exotic" through so-called sophisticated eyes; the inevitable cultural disjuncture that takes place when images such as these enter the art world via galleries and auctions. Gordon, I think, has managed to circumvent many of these problems of representation and commodification by making her photographs neither one thing nor another: neither reportage nor portraiture – nor, indeed, cultural voyeurism posing as anthropological investigation. Formally, the photographs are powerful, not least because Gordon opted to capture the wild and colourful celebrations in black and white, a choice that makes the end results seem timeless, almost restrained.

Initially, Gordon's images reminded me most of Irving Penn's equally extraordinary, but only superficially similar, photographs of the Asaro Mudmen of New Guinea. Penn did with the Mud Men what he did with everyone he photographed, from French working men to Parisian fashion models: he placed them in front of a backdrop of shadowy grey fabric, then lit them in a subtle way that helped heighten their otherness. In the images that result, you get the sense that, like those working men and models, they were simply another set of specimens for his tyrannically democratic photographic vision.

Gordon's Kanaval characters are captured in situ, but, more often than not, she convinces them to leave the main procession for a moment and follow her down a side street or into a doorway for what might be called a performance portrait. Put bluntly, she colludes in their performance, and they collude in her portraits. "Performance ethnography," elaborates Beasley, "is a critical stance in which the ethnographer works alongside the 'co-participants' to create a performance – an ongoing conversation between the participants, the ethnographer and the audience".

How exactly, though, do we, as viewers, participate in that ongoing conversation? What is it about the images that allows us to be curious onlookers rather that cultural voyeurs? Again, it's that fluent space they occupy between reportage and portraiture, the neither-here-nor-there quality. What is intriguing, too, about Gordon's photographs is the sense of stillness they often exude. For all the grotesquery, the surrealism, the constant intimations of the vividness, movement and madness of the carnival, the photographs are oddly quiet. Often, we are looking at a heavily made-up face or a mask that is looking, inscrutably, implacably, back at us.

So, just as the carnival in Jacmel is a moment when personal identity is suspended, hidden or merged into the greater play of masks, make-up, myth-making, costumes and performance, so these photographs suspend the ritualised mayhem of the event. Or, as Beasley puts it, "Gordon simply asks her participants to stand and look. The beauty of Gordon's images is that they encourage the viewer to look, look again, and even once more – to view the ever more complex realities of the here and now."

Now see this

Argentinian-born photographer Seba Kurtis travelled to north Africa in 2009 to do a project on the new routes created by human traffickers to smuggle immigrants to Europe. Alone, unable to speak Arabic, and constantly under threat from the people he was trying to photograph, he took solace in visiting the myriad local photographic studios. Salaam is a wonderful record of an accidental project. It is on show at the Quad Cinema Gallery in Derby until 5 September alongside Esyllt Hedd Evans's intimate and elegiac images of her grandparents' surroundings and belongings: two different but overlapping evocations of melancholy and belonging.